Lightning? 🤷♂️
Discussion
Lightning is non-existent on Darknet Markets for good reason. It isn't completely private.
Even if you run your own node and aren't on custodial wallets or LSPs like 95% of users (almost no privacy) - Receiver privacy is terrible, and hidden balances can be discovered by probing. Opening and closing channels also leaks data on chain.
Didn’t know it was possible to make sense of those things. Wouldn’t it be pretty hard to actually follow the sats between a few nodes?
All depends. First step is always running your own lightning node (which the vast majority don't do). But even after that there are a lot of caveats. Here are a few links with the technical details:
bitcoinmagazine.com/technical/state-of-bitcoin-lightning-network-privacy
https://abytesjourney.com/lightning-privacy/
https://github.com/lnbook/lnbook/blob/develop/16_security_privacy_ln.asciidoc#attacks-on-lightning
https://lightningprivacy.com/en/introduction
"We identified 27,183 private channels, discovered hidden balances, and showed how a passive adversary can infer payment endpoints with very high probability."